Schiller and Our Times

Schmidt Number: S-1014

On-line since: 30th April, 2018

We
have seen how Schiller grew up out of the ideas of the
Eighteenth Century and how the ideals of the Age of
Enlightenment had taken root in his soul. They had already
assumed their peculiar form when he left the Karlsschule and
wrote the above-mentioned theses.

If we
want to describe these ideas in a word, we may say that the
main problem was the emancipation of personality. This
liberation from age-old tradition goes still further. When
medieval man before the age of “Illumination”
thought about his relation to himself, to nature, the universe
and God, he found himself ready established within the
universe. He worshipped the same God without, who dwelt within
his own soul; the same forces which were active in the world
without, were active in man's own soul; there was a certain
unity to be seen in the laws of the universe and in the nature
of man. We need only think of men like Giordano Bruno: This
monistic conviction of the relationship of nature to man can be
found in his writings.

There
was thus no gulf between what we may call the moral claim and
the objective laws in nature. This opposition only arose later
when man excluded nature from divine influence. The attitude
which has grown up in materialism, knew no relation between
nature and moral feeling or what man develops within himself as
a moral claim.

This
was the origin of Rousseau-ism, which is fundamentally a
revolutionary feeling, a protest against the whole line of
development hitherto. It teaches that when we observe man's
demand for freedom and his assertion of morality, a harsh
discord appears. It asks whether there really can be such a
difference between the objective world and human nature, that
men must long to get out of it, to escape from the whole of
their civilisation.

These
spiritual struggles found expression in the temperament
of the young Schiller; and in the three dramas of his youth
this longing receives a new form. In the
“Räuber,” in “Fiesco” and
“Kabale und Liebe” we see depicted concretely, with
a vast pathos, the demand that man must do something to produce
this harmony. In the figure of Karl Moor, we see the creation
of a man who bears in himself the opposition between the
objective order and the demand made by his humanity, and feels
called upon to produce some harmony between nature and himself.
His tragedy arises because he believes that he can restore the
law by lawlessness and arbitrariness. In “Fiesco”
the longing for freedom crashes on the rock of ambition. The
ideal of freedom fails through this disharmony in the soul of
the ambitious Fiesco, who cannot find his way so far as to put
order into the moral ideal. In “Kabale und Liebe”
the demand of human nature in the uprising middle-classes
stands opposed to the demands of the world as they were
expressed in the ruling classes. The relation between moral
ideals and general ideas applicable to the world had been
lost. The discord echoes grandly, for all their youthful
immaturity, from the first dramas of Schiller.

Such
natures as Schiller's find themselves less easily than the
one-line, simpler and. unsophisticated type, just as we see in
natural evolution that lower creatures require shorter periods
of preparation than the more highly developed animals. Great
natures have to pass through the most varied phases, because
their inmost qualities have to be fetched up from the deepest
levels. Anyone who has much in him and comes into the world
with a claim to genius, will have a hard path, and will have to
work through many earlier stages — as the analogy of the
embryonic development of higher animals shows us.

What
Schiller lacked was knowledge of man and of the world. His
first plays show him with all the defects which arise from that
fact, but with all the merits which hardly appear again later
so clearly. This judgment is made from a fairly high level; we
have to realise what we owe to Schiller's greatness. But things
could not remain thus for long. Schiller had to rise beyond
this limited horizon; and we see how in his fourth play, Don
Carlos, he works his way to another standpoint. We may look
from a double angle, first from that of Don Carlos, second that
of Marquis Posa. Schiller himself tells us how his interest at
first lay with the youthful fiery Carlos and then passed to the
cosmopolitan Posa. That indicates a deep change in his own
personality.

Schiller had been summoned by his friend Körner to
Dresden, so that he might work there in peace. There he grew
acquainted with a philosophy and view of the world which was to
have a great influence on his own personality. Kantianism was a
necessary study for a person like Schiller, and we shall
understand his standpoint yet more deeply if we delay a moment
over what was then working upon him.

At
that time, we can see two quite definite currents in German
intellectual life. The one is that which finds most definite
expression in Herder's Ideas for the history of the
philosophy of mankind; the other the Kantian philosophy. In
Herder we have the passion to put man into relation with the
whole of nature and to understand him in that relation. It is
this striving for unity which makes Herder appear so modern a
man. ... Arguments brought now-a-days against Kantianism with
its dualism (which is still regarded as only an academic
philosophy), exist already in Herder's Metacritic. The whole
embraces a mass of great ideas; there is a striving after the
unification of nature and man. From the lowest product of
nature right up to the thought of man there is one law. What is
seen in man as the moral law, is in the crystal the law of its
form. One fundamental evolution runs through all that is,
so that that which forms the flower in the plant, develops in
man into humanity. It is the world-picture which appeared in
Goethe also and which he expressed in Faust in the words:

How all weaves itself to a whole; one thing works and lives in
the other,

and
which he describes in his Hymn to Nature.

Goethe
is wholly permeated by this striving for unity, as it found
expression in Giordano Bruno, the Pythagorean. He stands
completely within the stream:

What were a God who only touches from without,
And lets the All run past in cycles?
His task it were to move the world within,
To foster nature in himself, himself in nature.

That
is the monistic stream, to which Schiller at that period still
was a stranger. For him there was still a two-ness, a
dualism.

In his
Critique of Pure Reason and the Critique of Practical
Reason Kant had set a definite limit to human knowledge.
Man's capacity for knowledge extends as far as reason goes. It
can only give him the external, and cannot pierce to the real
being of things. That which is the thing-in-itself, is hidden
behind the appearance; man cannot even speak of it. But there
is something within man which cannot be mere appearance. That
is the moral law. On the one side — the world of
appearance; on the other — the moral law, the categorical
imperative, the “Thou shalt,” which may not be
doubted, which rises above knowledge and cannot be taken as
appearance. Thus in Kant's philosophy we have not merely
a duality such as we saw before, but the whole world of human
spiritual life is divided into two halves. That which is to be
superior to all criticism, the moral law, is not knowledge at
all, but a practical belief, which contains no limits of
knowledge but only moral postulates. Thus Kantianism appears as
the .most abrupt exposition of dualism.

Before
Kant there was a science of external appearance, and then a
science of reason which could penetrate by innate activity to
God, soul and immortality: that is the form of the Wolffian
philosophy. Kant, who had studied the English Sensationalists,
Hume and Locke, was at this juncture led to have doubts: how
shall we get anywhere if we have always to test the highest
ideas of God, Freedom and Immortality by their reasonableness.
He says in his introduction to the Critique of Pure
Reason“I had to destroy knowledge in order to
make room for faith.” Because we must believe, and in
order that we may believe, he thrust down knowledge from her
throne. He wanted to start from foundations which left no room
for doubt. Knowledge cannot ever reach to these things, but the
“Thou shalt” speaks so decisively that the harmony
which man is unable to discover, must be accomplished by God.
And so we have to postulate a God. As physical beings we are
enclosed in barriers, but as moral beings we must be free. This
gives an unbridgeable dualism; there is no balance between man
and nature.

Schiller, who in accordance with his temperament still held to
the opposition between nature and man, pictures in Don Carlos
the growth of man beyond nature to his ideals. He never puts
the question of what is possible, but only the question of the
“Thou shalt.” In Don Carlos it is not a criticism
of court-life that we have: That passes into the background
behind the practical moral postulates. “Man, be such that
the laws of your action could become the universal laws of
humanity.” That was Kant's demand; and in Marquis Posa,
the cosmopolitan idealist, Schiller sets up a claim for the
independence of the ideal from all that comes from nature.

When
he finished Don Carlos, Schiller stood in the completest
possible opposition to the view of Goethe and Herder, and
therefore at the beginning of his life at Weimar
no contact with them was possible. But Schiller became the
Reformer of Kantianism: he strove for a monistic view, but
could find the unity only in the aesthetic sphere, in the
problem of beauty. He shows us how man only lives fully when he
both ennobles nature up to his own level and draws morality
from above into his nature. The categorical imperative does not
subdue him to its sway, but he serves willingly what is
contained in the “Thou shalt.” Thus Schiller
reaches the heights and rises above Kant. He opposes Kant who
makes of man not a free being but a slave, bowed beneath the
yoke of duty. He saw clearly that there is something in man
quite different from this bowing beneath the yoke of the
“Thou shalt.” In monumental phrases we find
expressed his approximation to the essential of Goethe's
and Herder's attitude: “Gladly serve I my friends, yet
alas I do it with pleasure; thus it irks me to find that
there's no virtue in me.”

Kant
had degraded what man does willingly from his own inclination,
and set on a higher level what he did from a sense of duty.
Kant apostrophises passionately the stern duty which has
nothing attractive in her. Schiller raises man from his own
weakness, when he makes the moral law a law of his own nature.
Through the study of history, through honest inclination and
devotion to human life he reached the harmony that had been
lost and thus to an understanding of Goethe. Schiller describes
in splendid words in the memorable letter of 23rd August 1794,
what was Goethe's way:

“I have for a long time, even though from a distance,
observed the course of your spirit and with ever new wonder
noted the path you have traced out for yourself. You seek for
the necessary in nature, but you seek it along the hardest
path, from which all weaker forces would shrink. You take all
nature as a whole in order to illuminate a part; and in the
totality of their appearances you seek the basis of explanation
for the individual.”

Here
Schiller had reached the height to which he had to evolve.
Though he had started from a dualism, he had now reached the
unity of man and nature.

Thus
he attained to that form of creation which was peculiarly his
in the latest period, from the middle of the nineties onward,
and to friendship with Goethe. It was a historical friendship
because it did not look only for the happiness of their two
selves but was fruitful for the world and for humanity.

In
this friendship of Goethe and Schiller we have not merely
Goethe, and Schiller, but a third something: Goethe plus
Schiller. Anyone who follows the course of the spiritual life,
will discern in it one being, which could only exist, because
in their selfless friendship and mutual devotion
something developed which stood as a new being above the
single personality. This mood will give us the proper
transition to Goethe and to all that he meant to Schiller.